The epitome of excess, Rayanne was a physical onslaught – all those braids, all those layers, all that volume – whose single-parent household and descent into drug-induced near-death was a means for the Chases to betray their suburban condescension and for Holzman to betray her commentary on privileged folk’s response to socioeconomic divides and the complexities of hierarchical friendships.
“I knew I wanted Rayanne to be wild and to lead Angela into challenging new situations,” Holzman says. “Most stories begin with an old order crumbling because some unexpected force has exerted itself,” Holzman says, via email, “That, for me, was Rayanne.” Angela’s newly acquired friendships with Rayanne Graff (AJ Langer) and Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz) embodied her future, while her ex-best friend Sharon Cherski (Devon Odessa) personified her past. But the parents were ultimately essential to MSCL’s impact, because they not only represented our lifelong struggle with identity, they represented where Angela was coming from in the story of where she was going. The choice was, in fact, made out of necessity, since, as a minor, Danes’ hours on set were limited. MSCL was the rare drama that focused on the mundane minutiae of family life (which meant it also appealed to an adult demographic), this sphere often being relegated to the comedy genre. She gave Angela parents (Patty, the breadwinner, Graham, the homebody) who were still themselves in the midst of establishing their identities and discovering their incompatibility with traditional domestic tropes. Highly attuned to small-screen stereotypes, Holzman was intent on dismantling them. “Everything that you love about that show was already there, just in those words that she wrote from this girl’s point of view,” says Herskovitz, who adds, “It’s not like she was doing herself what she was doing was the sensibility that I think every sensitive introspective person has when they go through adolescence.” Both he and Zwick read her notes and immediately responded, “OK, go. Holzman wrote from her own memories of high school – Herskovitz says she could conjure them better than anyone he had ever met – formulating what would eventually become the voice of MSCL’s narrator. There they approached writer Winnie Holzman about creating their next series, and when Herskovitz mentioned Secret/Seventeen, she “really sparked to it”, as she had been ruminating about her own adolescence. So Herskovitz and co-producer Ed Zwick moved on to thirtysomething, a dramedy about the angst of a bunch of delayed adolescents in their 30s.
#Cast of my so called life series
“It was my interpretation of my own experience of being that age and what it was like to go through all the tectonic changes that your mind and your body go through at that time,” he recalls.īut management changed, and his series was not picked up in the end.
The seeds of MSCL date back to the 80s when Showtime assigned Herskovitz to write a series about teenagers he conceived a “very personal, very internal” story about a boy and called it Secret/Seventeen.
“Television was externalised in a very particular way, and having the subjective point of view of this girl that was not afraid to show her pain, to show her terror, that sort of thing was very new on television – and, I think, in certain ways ahead of its time.” “Trying to do a television show from inside of a person’s experience was a pretty new thing,” recalls co-producer Marshall Herskovitz. Despite her attempt at maturity, however, her solipsistic view of the world laid bare her white suburban privilege and her often contradictory views within that. With her, the personal was political Angela’s revolution was within herself, a rebellion against her former identity – the one prescribed by her parents. “People say you should be yourself, like yourself is this definite thing,” she’d say. Like The Wonder Years before it, MSCL was that rare series to use a teenager as its narrator, but, unlike Kevin Arnold, Angela Chase was a highly unreliable one. Appearing for one season on ABC in the US and on Channel 4 in the UK from 1994 to 1995, My So-Called Life revolved around a 15-year-old girl searching for her identity.
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